Women, feminism, and geek culture

Harriet the Linkspam (1 June 2015)

All the women I know in video games are tired | Boing Boing (May 29): “For the most part, I still have the same job that I have always had (not that I’m not proud of the growth I’ve had within it over the years). For my friends, the Twine revolutionaries and the vocal Tweeters and the other writers, a great act of deception has occurred: We’ve been in the New York Times and been invited to conferences and told that we are Important Voices, doing Important Work, we’ve been on the news at night and in magazines. We are awash in social capital. But none of it translates to real capital.”

tim | “Truth is the first casualty of war.” (May 27): “I know how deep the need to know the truth can go when you’re brought up in a world that seems to be built on lies. We as trans people all come from a world like that, even those of us who only have the fuzziest sense early on that we’re being lied to about who we are. To paraphrase (IIRC) Katha Pollitt, social change is made by people who can’t stand the way things are any more. It’s not made by people who are well-served by the world as it is.”

Where Are All The WoC Hackers In Movies? | Model View Culture (May 27): “does the film industry believe that all women techies are white? Women programmers are almost never played by black, latina, native or asian women. The film and TV industry sends the message to women of color that we are not hackers, or at least not supposed to be. Casting hacker characters as primarily white men, and sometimes white women, leaves women of color out of the picture. Lack of representation and exposure is one reason why black women make up the lowest percentage of programmers in the tech industry (less than 1%): if you don’t see anyone who looks like you in a particular field or job, you are less likely to venture into it.”

Bias against women in science persists, even in egalitarian societies | Ars Technica (May 29): “the researchers found that both implicit and explicit measures suggested a strong association between men and science in all 66 nations included in the study. These implicit stereotypes persisted even in countries where women make up approximately half of the STEM workforce, though explicit biases are weaker in these countries, which suggests that simply educating or employing women in science-related fields is not adequate to break down these long-held biases.”

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I had a different take on the portrayal of disability in Mad Max: Fury Road. It was a brutal world, and almost every survivor had been affected by violence or radiation poisoning: villains, heroes, anti-heroes, and bystanders alike. Only a very few were the exceptions with no visible issues. Some glorified their differences, some treated them matter-of-fact, one made jokes about his. I didn’t see disability as an indicator of evil or corruption in that movie. It was just part of their harsh world.